Rogues of Discord
by INTP
Summary: Steam-punk AU. Advanced technology swirls and clashes with magic as one man's quest to dominate the future world sends the British Empire and the countries of America--the Union, Confederacy, Republic of Texas, and Spanish California--reeling with shock.


Prologue. London 1842.

"No more readings for the day," said Cassandra, annoyed.

She could hear footsteps and creaking floorboards, sense something like curiosity radiating toward her as she sat in front of her candlelit mirror. The visitors continued from the waiting room, through the draped alcove where she conducted business, nearing the curtains to her private quarters.

"I said--"

"Reducto."

The small coffee table that stood in the middle of the parlor splintered against the tapestried stone walls.

"If you're ministry underlings, I'll have you know I've a verified permit to be here. From the Minister of Magic himself!" Her voice wavered as she turned from her seat and peered through the incense-laden darkness. At the entrance to her bedroom stood a figure, dark black outlined in lighter shadows, half-hidden by the long strings of Oriental beads she had hung for privacy. A resonant voice, different from the female one that had cursed her furniture into fragments beseeched her mockingly.

"Oh, come now Cassandra, just one more reading, we're no magical fuzz if that's what you're aiming at."

"What do you want?" Cassandra watched his reflection, riveted to the cushioned seat in front of her mirror. The man hmmed unctuously.

"A confirmation of sorts."

Cassandra hastily stood when she heard laughter in the background, one a deep grunting, the two others high ladies' voices, but the man in front stood silently. Foolish courage welled within her.

"How dare you barge into my establishment, my own private suite for this nonsense! Go have a laugh at Madame Delphina's down at the docks. The inner Eye clears for no one, not even at the Seer's behest, and it's bloody cloudy at 3 in the morning."

She could sense, like that emanating curiosity earlier, a taunting smirk spread across the man's face. He walked slowly through the rattling beads until he stood over her, not very tall but nearly looming above her slight frame. His blue eyes bore into her own with fierce intensity, distressing her more than the shock she felt the second their eyes met: this man had absolutely no magical blood in him whatsoever. He spoke through gritted teeth.

"Then we will have to _make_ you see."

More footsteps and three more figures emerged from the darkness. A tall masked woman and burly blond man held poised wands while another woman, short and pale, stared at her with stern concentration, arms folded tightly against her narrow chest. Cassandra addressed the witch and wizard forcefully.

"You know there is _no_ spell or potion or curse or charm to force the Gift."

The dark-haired witch smiled with amused disdain, casually placing her empty hand on her hip. The wizard twirled his wand between thumb and forefinger anxiously, while his other hand held an enormous black bag. The young man in front of her bore an imposing presence--his slick, side-parted brown hair gleaming in the candlelight, poreless pink skin, immaculate white gloves all indicative of a Confederate playboy just come from a ball or opera. His smile, almost friendly, beamed down at her.

"But surely you know magic can't do everything, just like when you foresaw your husband's death and could do nothing to stop it."

"How would you know that? I told _no one_ about seeing Charlie's death." The man continued, ignoring her.

"What was it?--only five, six years since you left that school--"

"Hogwarts," the masked witch offered. Cassandra could see fury rise inside of him like a geyser at the correction, though she was probably the only one to tell something like that. His external control was impeccable, though it did not distract her from his previous revelation.

"How do you know these things? How could you know about Charlie?"

"Do you mean Charles James Shaxby? Born November 3, 1819 to Garrett Murphy and Ruth Shaxby, née MacFarlan? In a third floor flat, second on the right, Foster Street, Cheapside, London, under his Majesty King George III of Great Britain? Married to Cassandra Trelawney, born May 17, 1819 to equally uninteresting parents in an equally uninteresting slum of London under the same uninteresting ruler? That very man?"

Cassandra, taken aback by this stranger's knowledge and irreverence, scowled furiously, spouting the first retort she could think of.

"And I suppose your President Monroe is some sort of supreme example of a leader of the free world?"

"Well he _did_ get us Florida," drawled the thin-lipped, blonde woman. "Can we get on with this?" _Squib_, thought Cassandra, with an intense hatred she'd never felt toward the word before.

"Yes, yes, of course," waved the man cavalierly. He stepped back a few feet from Cassandra, stretching his arms out to his sides in a theatrical gesture.

"_I_ am Ambrose Hart"--he took a curt bow--"the leader of this little band of brigands. Let me introduce you to my cohorts: this pushy woman is Florence Hart, and yes, she is as stubborn and uppity as she appears."

The woman remained still, unscathed by her--brother's? husband's?--insults. As Cassandra examined her, there was hardly any contrast between the pale color of her skin and hair.

The man extended his hand to the broad-shouldered wizard who continued to look somewhat anxious, still fidgeting with his wand. Lines crinkled his dark blue eyes, though he looked hardly twenty and fresh out of Durmstrang, as his heavily accented, though innocuous, speech gave away.

"I am Roderick Wilhelm. So nice to meet you, famous Trelawney woman."

"Yes, tickled, I assure you," added Ambrose dryly. The witch stepped forward, clearing her throat authoritatively.

"And this lovely, though masked, woman would like her identity kept secret for the time being." In the candlelight, the witch's mask rippled and swayed, shadows swooning under the flame's glow and sinister reflections pulsing erratically from its depths. Cassandra had seen nothing like it in the two-and-a-half decades she'd lived within the magical realm, not even when she dabbled in the Dark Arts, though one hardly dabbles in such a thing, she addended to her own thoughts.

"Now that we're all acquainted I'll go back to what I was saying. Of course, I can do no magic; I'm sure you've deducted that, my little psychic. But when I discovered those who could, well, I couldn't let that hold me back, now could I? Technology here and in the Americas--both the Union and Confederacy--is racing full steam ahead though you Brits have a little progress on us. It's not as if we're as, ahem, united as your empire is. And the Republic of Texas is a most uncertain and occasionally uncooperative partner, so I've been thinking of ways to push ourselves along. My darling cousin and I have surmised that you wand-wavers and your precious magic are just the key to our success. And yet, we are bound by none of your silly laws, excluding physics of course. The first in this race will be the most powerful, not preposterous men in robes or suits ordering doctrines and decrees."

Cassandra tilted her head, flabbergasted.

"What on earth do you want with me then? I know nothing of steam engines and science--Charlie dealt with all that rubbish. I would be the least help to you."

"My dear Cassandra, it's more than just rubbish." He motioned for the large, black leather bag Wilhelm held, lifting from it an unusual contraption that Cassandra had never seen the likes of before.

Spidery spindles stuck out from the helmet-like structure like an array of manticore spines, almost deliberately set in a circular but inscrutable pattern. The helmet was a curved shining sheet of brass, and the sharp, silvery tips rising from it bowed outward from where they were inserted. It was like some strange Trojan warrior's helmet, but instead of a plumed mohawk of feathers, there were gleaming metallic spires dotting the surface. Cords and wires sprouted like a clump of weeds from the base of the neck, flowing back into the dark depths of the bag.

Cassandra gaped at the unusual object with horrified curiosity, knowing it did not take a psychic to understand what Hart meant to use the device for. She opened her mouth to scream.

"Silencio!" the witch boomed. The charm hit her in the hollow of her neck where she clutched at her noiseless voicebox futilely.

Mouthing words of vitriol and fear, spells that would never materialize, Cassandra grabbed a long fang of a hairpin and forced it at the mirror behind her with all her strength. The glass shattered forcefully and the ornate golden frame collapsed into the fragile glass vanity beneath, cleaving through the layers of shelving filled with cosmetics and hair brushes and exploding into shards against the wooden floor. Reflexively muttering the Repairing charm--useless without word or wand--Cassandra knelt and sobbed at the remains of the 16th century heirloom. It was the loudest possible sound she hoped to make without a voice.

Ambrose tutted with false concern.

"Now look what you've done." He signaled to the masked, nameless witch, who approached with the device.

"Do you know what this is?" asked the witch in her low, clipped contralto. "Well of course you don't. I've told them everything of the Ministry of Magic and its ridiculous laws." The witch fixed her with a conspiratorial glance. "Do you know what intrigues them most? the Department of Muggle Artifacts--it intrigues them that witches and wizards are prosecuted for merely tampering with the most mundane and pedestrian objects from their world." She grinned, whispering in Cassandra's ear. "They are so in love with their reflection in our eyes. It's almost cute if it weren't so bloody childish."

She finished showing Cassandra the device, though why she divulged the almost hostile information she did not know. Hart took the helmet from her hands, eying it with inspired admiration. He knelt to face Cassandra closely, wincing slightly at the smattering of broken glass. It dug into her own knees with a now dull cruelty.

"You see, Cassandra, this is quite different, almost the opposite in fact, of your Muggle Artifacts nonsense. Some of your deviant--though I might call them creative--witches and wizards use magic to make mere technological devices do what they wish for them to do. I, on the other hand, will be the first to use technology to exploit the properties of your world--specifically, magic."

The man's determined, aspiring tone sent a chill through Cassandra. She flailed her arms against him, his words, his intent, everything he spoke of, everything he stood for, landing several blows across his face and chest before a _Petrificus _spell fixed her body stiffly and she collapsed to the floor.

Hart gently raised her limp head to place the helmet and strap it beneath her chin, its spiny protrusions clinking together softly. Reaching into his coat pocket, he pulled out a blindingly white handkerchief, balled it up, and stuffed it tightly in her mouth.

"Now my dear, you will show us what you see. You will show us everything we want to know. We are to learn the identities of men, great and important men, inventors and innovators: men who will change the future."

Cassandra's eyes pleaded, begging for an explanation, or at the very least, mercy.

"Oh, you want to know why we're doing this? You see, _we_ want to be the ones who change history, who create the future--for myriad reasons I assure you. Not all of them innocent, but I would swear on my life that the intentions of these men we seek are not purely altruistic either." His voice trembled with the same fervent intensity of his eyes.

"We should begin," said Florence. Heels clacking against the floor, then crunching on the mirror shards, she approached Cassandra to watch behind her brother. The masked witch stayed in close proximity; Wilhelm, the muscle, stayed watchful at the door maintaining a defensive position.

Hart reached into the massive bag at his side from which he pulled the helmet. Now he strained to pull an intricate steam engine from its depths, small and portable but terrifically dense and heavy. Candlelight gleamed off the brass tubes and silver valves that ran along the sides, inside, and through the device like a bundle of snakes. The cords and wires that emerged from the base of the helmet found individual indentations and openings, connecting in a complex circuit. A wheel stood at one end, anchored to the heavy mahogany base, while a thick pipe stuck out from the top. With the engine now close to the helmet, the spines seemed to buzz at such close proximity to it.

The masked witch pointed her wand to the crank at one end of the engine and spoke a few words, enchanting it into motion. Slowly at first, the engine creaked and chugged to life, an occasional valve screaming softly as clouds of steam billowed gently from the stack.

"It's working. Dear me, it working!" Ambrose muttered, awestruck, and almost in a trance reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a pen and small notebook.

"Of course it's working," Florence whispered. "I designed the damn thing."

As the engine warmed up, working harder, the spines began to tremble and sway as if affected by a rotating magnetic field, an occasional spark of electricity jumping between two near ones.

"Flip the switch," Florence instructed, her voice choked and husky.

Ambrose placed a hand at the nape of Cassandra's neck, pulling her face close to his, as close as a lover would. He looked into her colorless, watery gray eyes, brimming with tears and caressed her wet cheek.

"It is worth the sacrifice, I promise."

Twisting the circular switch between the crown and nape of the helmet, he laid her head back down as power surged through the metal. The spines hardened and crackled with intensity, all of them curving stiffly and bending in, touching at the tips. Silent and unmoving, the only indication of Cassandra's horror were her widened, terrified eyes. Unable to even grit her teeth through cloth and spell, she lay there motionlessly, the helmet's power occasionally twitching her head to one side or the other as the engine whirred madly.

"It's not working..." Ambrose glared at his cousin accusingly.

Untroubled, she turned to the masked witch. "Increase the speed." Two sets of eyes glittered.

The witch seemed to hesitate for half a second, then aimed her wand and spoke.

The engine's bass chugging and high-pitched squeals affected the helmet almost instantly. As the spines soaked up power they began to sink through the metal of the helmet, boring into Cassandra's skull.

Hart readied his pen.


End file.
